Sheridan Plaza Hotel - Chicago, IL
Posted by: 
adgorn
N 41° 57.930 W 087° 39.294
16T E 445733 N 4646153
Built in 1920 on the NE corner of Wilson Ave and Sheridan Rd. Designed by architect W.W. Ahlschlager, it was one of more elegant residential hotels that opened in Uptown during the boom following the completion of the North Side Elevated train.
Waymark Code: WM4M89
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 09/06/2008
Views: 4
In its heyday, it was home to visiting baseball teams playing at Wrigley Field, as well as the Cubs' residential home headquarters. When it opened in 1925, it was the costliest building in Chicago outside of the Loop. Its staff came from the finest hotels in America and Europe.
NOTE: A recent building permit indicates that renovations are underway! That's good because the facade has lost pieces of terra cotta in recent years.
Check out (
visit link)
for very interesting original information on the builder and his works.
From Jazz Age Chicago (
visit link)
"Until the beginning of the twentieth century, Uptown possessed few residential hotels or large apartment buildings. Most of the district's residences were either single-family houses or two- and three-story flats. This began to change with the extension of the Northwestern elevated railroad to Wilson Avenue in 1900. The 'L' significantly reduced commuting times and ticket costs for those who lived in Uptown and worked in other parts of the city. Chicagoans who may have once considered Uptown "too far north" began to view the area as an attractive and well-connected section of the city. The 'L' also stimulated increased real estate investment in Uptown. Speculators, expecting rapid growth in the district's population, began to purchase properties throughout the district, pushing land values upward. As real estate prices and property taxes rose, many property owners sold their homes or one-story shops to developers who replaced them with larger, more profitable office buildings, retail stores, movie theaters, and multi-story residential hotels and apartment buildings.
During the 1910s and 1920s, several new eight- to twelve-story apartment buildings were built on land formerly occupied by large single-family homes. The once tree-lined Sheridan Road began to remind some observers of the Loop or Midtown Manhattan as new buildings pushed skyward. Uptown's apartment hotels struck many Chicagoans as the epitome of modern urban living. Most offered the kind of amenities and services, such as swimming pools and cleaning maids, typically associated with high-priced downtown hotels or luxury resorts. In time, overbuilding drove apartment rents down to levels low enough that Uptown became an attractive place of residence for young, unattached men and women, many of them newcomers to the city of Chicago.
As with most of the city's outlying hotels, Uptown's hotels offered a mix of renting options. Guests could rent a room for a single night or for several weeks or months at a time. A few "hotels," looking to attract a wealthier class of residents, rented rooms only on a monthly basis, functioning more as an apartment building. Chicagoans of the early twentieth century, however, shied away from referring to such buildings as "apartments," due in part to the term's association with working-class tenements and also the willingness of proprietors to rent out units on a nightly basis."